Mrs. Eddy tells us in "The First Church of Christ. Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 189): "The government of divine Love derives its omnipotence from the love it creates in the heart of man; for love is allegiant, and there is no loyalty apart from love." The dictionary defines loyalty as, ''Fidelity to duty, firm allegiance, love, service, constancy." The Scientist knows that the only success he has ever attained in the practice of Christian Science has come to him in proportion as he has been firmly allegiant to its teachings.
The Bible is full of wonderful instances of loyalty. As the prophets of old lived up to their clearest sense of God they were led on to higher ideals and progressive demonstrations of God's power. They proved that loyalty to God and to the real man as His image and likeness, healed all phases of sin disease, and sorrow, all phases of misunderstanding, hatred, and fear. What finer proof of that statement is there than the story of Jacob and Esau, and the revolution wrought in character by a right apprehension of God? Following years of lax morals, deceit, injustice and estrangement from his brother, Jacob had his experience with the angel at Peniel. After wrestling with this vision until light broke in his consciousness, we are told that Jacob saw God "face to face." The immediate human correlative of that experience was his setting forth to meet Esau with love and real desire to see his brother man as the expression of good; and the wonderful line follows, "For therefore I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me." Loyalty to God, and to God's concept of man, had healed the sense of unloving separation between the brothers.
A Christian Scientist once had a clear experience of the sin-healing power of thought which was faithfully reflecting divine Mind. This student's house had been entered one evening, and from it a sum of money taken. The Scientist, being busy all the next day, found it late in the afternoon before she was alone and free to think systematically. She then saw that she had been much darkened mentally, apparently by the belief in a mysterious power of evil, of crime that could control man. After correcting that mistake by dwelling on the fact of God's omnipotence and the perfection of His spiritual creation, the whole mental situation was cleared up, and she, like Jacob, caught a glimpse of man as though she "had seen the face of God." The next morning the mail brought an anonymous letter containing the very bills that had been taken, and a little statement that the writer was unable to keep the money. What a reward that was for allegiance to the instruction of our Leader, who taught that the real man is the full manifestation of God! One individual's loyalty to Truth had helped another to be loyal to the better self he had been tempted to dishonor.
